1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and an image forming method.
2. Related Art
There has been known an image forming apparatus that performs recording by discharging liquid from a nozzle such that ink droplets (dots) are landed on a medium. In the image forming apparatus, printing is performed by using metallic ink containing metal particles, such as aluminum particles, as a pigment, other than common color ink (for example, color ink of KCMY).
In metallic printing using metallic ink, since the metallic luster and color tone of a printed matter are changed by the amount of the metal particles contained in the ink, it was difficult to implement metallic printing with a desired color tone and metallic luster. Accordingly, a printing method has been proposed, which adjusts the amount of aluminum powder contained in a print and metallic luster by making the printed shape of the ink in a net shape and changing the size of the net, when performing printing by using the ink containing the aluminum powder as metal particles (for example, JP-A-11-78204).
According to the printing method of JP-A-11-78204, it is possible to print an image with a high quality image and favorable metallic luster. When an image is formed such that the portion printed with metallic ink becomes a net shape, metallic ink dots are partially thinned in the pixels of the image and printing is performed. However, as the metallic ink dots are thinned from the pixels at the outline of the image, the entire image may be seen dimly, which deteriorates the image quality. That is, it may be difficult to print a clear metallic image in the method described in JP-A-11-78204.